Scott Cleland

President, Precursor® LLC
Internetization Strategist

Bio Summary

Scott Cleland is an influential precursor and proven thought leader on internetization, the Internet's transformational process.

As an internetization strategist, Cleland is the expert's expert on how internetization affects business, investment, competition, markets and the economy. Cleland organizes chaos. He is an original thinker who specializes in bringing clarity of thought and applying framework analysis to big complex internetization problems before others.

Cleland is President of Precursor® LLC, an internetization consultancy serving Fortune 500 clients. Cleland authors the widely-read PrecursorBlog, chairs NetCompetition® a pro-competition e-forum, and publishes the watchdog site Google Monitor.Cleland served as Deputy United States Coordinator for Communications and Information Policy in the George H. W. Bush Administration.

Eight different Congressional subcommittees have sought Cleland's expert testimony and Institutional Investor twice ranked him the #1 independent analyst in his field. Scott Cleland has been profiled in Fortune, National Journal, Barrons, WSJ's Smart Money, and Investors Business Daily; and twelve publications have featured his op-eds.

Further Background

As President of Precursor® LLC since 2006, Cleland has served Fortune 500 clients as an industry expert's expert consultant on various internetization issues. Precursor LLC specializes in bringing clarity of thought and applying framework analysis to big complex internetization problems before others.

Since 2006, Cleland has served as Chairman of NetCompetition® an e-forum promoting Internet competition choices for consumers, which is supported by broadband interests. Cleland is a front-line champion and leading public voice for market-based broadband competition over government-managed competition. He also has spearheaded new thinking underlying efforts to modernize: communications law, federal spectrum management, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In addition, Cleland is a world-leading research authority on Google and author of the only critical treatise/book on Google: Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc., which has been translated into Portuguese and Korean. Since 2011, he has published GoogleMonitor.com, a watchdog site dedicated to making Google more transparent and accountable.

Scott Cleland was the first analyst to foresee that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick would tip Google to a global monopoly and that its unprecedented market power -- in combination with its aversion to accountability -- would lead to serious ongoing antitrust, privacy, and property problems.

Scott Cleland is the only Google expert to have testifiedthreetimes before U.S. Congressional Subcommittees on Google. Government's on four continents have sought out or used Precursor's Google research. Overall, The New York Times described Cleland in a front page story on Google as "a consultant for Google competitors and a consumer watchdog whose blog maintains a close watch on Google's privacy issues."

Previously, Scott Cleland served institutional investors as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Precursor Group Inc. Cleland founded and co-built the Precursor Group Broker Dealer from scratch to the #1 Institutional Investor-recognized independent research firm in communications in four years. The firm served most of the top investment institutions in the U.S., including 39 of the top 50. At that time and in that role, Cleland was well-known as one of the most-widely quoted and interviewed analysts in the United States. Overall Cleland has thirteen years experience in the institutional investment business including working for Legg Mason and the Schwab Washington Research Group.

As the Precursor Group's lead communications investment analyst, Cleland was known for making two seminal communications investment calls. Cleland's research was first to spotlight that the Internet dotcom bubble would burst because the market incorrectly assumed that Internet traffic was growing about twelve times faster than it actually was. And Fortune profiled Cleland as "ahead of the pack in raising questions about WorldCom's debt, profitability, and survival" before WorldCom went bankrupt.

Public Service

Scott Cleland served as a member of the United States Department of State Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy for several terms. In 2002, Cleland conceived and was the Founding Chairman of the Investorside Research Association, the first and only association of independent research firms serving investors. Also in 2002, Institutional Investor Magazine called Cleland "the de facto spokesperson for the independent research community." Cleland was the lead source and primary analyst for Hedrick Smith's Emmy Award winning PBS Frontline Special, "The Wall Street Fix." Immediately following the surprise announcement of Enron's bankruptcy, Cleland was the first analyst asked to testify before Congress to explain how its then near record corporate fraud could happen.

Cleland has testified before Congress sixteen times before eight different subcommittees on a variety of forward-looking public policy issues.

Scott Cleland's career as a public servant concluded in 1992 as the Deputy United States Coordinator for Communication and Information Policy at the U.S. Department of State, serving President H. W. Bush. Previously, Cleland served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the then Secretary of State James A. Baker III. He received the Superior Honor Award for his role as the lead congressional briefer to Secretary Baker on all foreign policy matters during the first Gulf War and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. Prior to that, he served as Director of Legislative Affairs for the U.S. Department of Treasury and as a Budget Examiner for OMB in the U.S. Executive Office of the President.

Education

Scott Cleland earned a Masters of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984 and a BA in Political Science from Kalamazoo College in 1982. In 2000, Cleland earned Kalamazoo College's Distinguished Achievement Award.

Selected Media

The Diane Rehm Show, National Public Radio, "AT&T's Proposed Acquisition of Time Warner," 10-25-16

Book: Search & Destroy
Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.

This is the other side of the Google story—the unauthorized book that Google does not want you to read. In Search & Destroy, Google expert Scott Cleland, shows that the world's most powerful company is not who it pretends to be.

Google pretends to be a harmless lamb, but chose a full-size model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex as its mascot. Beware the T-Rex in sheep's clothing.

Google has acquired far more information, both public and private, and has invented more ways to use it, than anyone in history. Information is power, and in Google's case, it's the power to influence and control virtually everything the Internet touches.